Bypassing Winter
by Pseudonymperson
Summary: After a car accident resulting in the deaths of her whole family, Skye struggles to regain normalcy. But her definition of normalacy is not so easily achieved...
1. Chapter 1

"Family is not an important thing. It's everything."

-Michael J. Fox

Bypassing Winter

_September 27, 8:01 PM_

Everything has changed.

* * *

_6:30 AM_

_Skye and Jane's bedroom_

_Cameron, Massachusetts_

The day started normally enough.

"Skye?"

"What is it, Jane?"

"Do you ever wonder if life doesn't exist?"

"What do you mean? Of course life exists, it's a scientifically proven fact."

"No, like if _we _don't exist and we're just figments of the universe's deranged imagination, floating endlessly on through the cosmos of life, drifting alone in the dark galaxy until the end of time."

Skye was quiet. Then she spoke.

"Time doesn't _have_ an ending, Jane."

"Really? Because I'm thinking about writing a book where Sabrina Starr saves the universe, and she has to travel to the end of all time. Do you think book publishers accept technicalities?"

Skye sighs and buries her face in her pillow. Jane waits.

"Jane, you're in tenth grade. Aren't you too old for Sabrina Starr?"

"I will never be too old for Sabrina. We understand each other. Can you explain time to me, please?"

Skye groans.

She recites in a monotone, "Time is a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future, and also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them. Time has long been a major subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, and sports, the sciences, music, dance, and live theater all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems. Simple, relatively uncontroversial definitions of time include 'time is what clocks measure' and 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once'.

Jane pulls her notebook out and scribbles furiously.

"In non-relativistic classical mechanics, Newton's concept of 'relative, apparent, and common time' can be used in the formulation of a prescription for the synchronization of clocks. Events seen by two different observers in motion relative to each other produce a mathematical concept of time that works sufficiently well for describing the everyday phenomena of most people's experience. In the late nineteenth century, physicists encountered problems with the classical understanding of time, in connection with the behavior of electricity and magnetism. Einstein resolved these problems by invoking a method of synchronizing clocks using the constant, finite speed of light as the maximum signal velocity. This led directly to the result that observers in motion relative to one another measure different elapsed times for the same event."

* * *

_8:00 AM_

"There may also be parts of the universe well beyond what can be observed in principle. If inflation occurred,this is likely, for exponential expansion would push large regions of space beyond our observable horizon."

"Um, Skye?"

No reply comes from the blonde, lost in her depictions of time quantization.

_8:20 AM_

Finally, Jane can stand it no longer. She fishes her copy of _War and Peace _out from under her bed, whispers an apology to the spirit of Leo Tolstoy, and chucks it at Skye's head.

"In addition to the theory of- Ow! Jane, what was that for?"

"Skye, you've been talking for the last two hours! I just want a short explanation. You know, that five minute one that you spent hours perfecting back in seventh grade."

Skye looks irritated.

"Well, why didn't you say so?"

* * *

_8:27 AM_

"Okay, thanks, Skye!"

"Don't you have soccer practice at nine?"

"Yes, why?"

"Do you need a ride? I think the minivan's working now. Jeffrey came over last Saturday and helped me fix it."

"Oooo..."

Skye elbows her.

"Shut up."

"Fine. But I still think that you and Jeffrey would make a-"

Skye elbows her again.

"Do you need a ride or not?"

"No, I'll walk. I need the exercise. I'll probably get back at around noon."

Skye falls back onto her bed and lies there for a moment, staring at the ceiling.

* * *

_8:45 AM_

Jane runs downstairs, yelling a quick goodbye. The door slams shut behind her.

Skye opens one eye. "Well, that's another three hours of my life I'll never get back."

She rolls off her bed and goes downstairs to make breakfast.


	2. Chapter 2

_7:54 PM_

_The New England Conservatory_

_Boston, Massachusetts_

"Hello? Is this Jeffrey Tifton? I'm Officer Cobb. There's been an...accident."

This couldn't be happening.

* * *

_7:46 PM_

_Jane lies__ pinned underneath the twisting wreckage of the minivan, unable to breathe, or to scream. _

_The light is calling her, and she wants nothing more than to follow it. "Goodbye," she whispers, and answers the call._

_The last thing Batty sees is Hound, running towards her. Hound, who died two years ago and who she thought she would never see again. Her Hound. And then she's running towards him, running towards the light._

_Rosalind closes her eyes. Her mother is calling her._

_Iantha finds, in the end, that the stars are closer than she thought they were._

_Ben knows his father now._

___And Martin Penderwick loves his family. He always does._

* * *

_Massachusetts General Hospital_

_Noon_

_September 28th_

_The Extensive Care Unit_

The hospital room is dimmed, smelling of sickness and antiseptic.

Skye knows that she shouldn't be alive. As her pain comes and goes, she listens to the doctors' detached, clinical conversations. From what she hears, she knows she will go soon, and she is glad.

She knows that her family is gone.

Jeffrey is the one who tells her.

* * *

He takes her hand, grasping it as if it were something fragile and delicate and so _unskye-like _that he wants to scream.

"Skye," he says fiercely, "You have to fight. You have to stay."

She laughs bitterly, a harsh sound that reverberates off the closed walls of the narrow room.

"Too late. I'm already gone."


	3. Chapter 3

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person back then."

-Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_

_The first of October_

Somehow, she's alive.

Somehow, she almost manages to forget.

Almost.

* * *

_The Penderwicks. Family of seven. Recently deceased._

Summarizing always helps. Used to help.

She goes over the facts in her mind once again, analyzing and crossing out the parts she knows (thinks-hopes-prays) are not real.

_Alive. Not dead. Not gone. Still here._

As if the repetition of it could make it real. As if the repetition of it could bring her family back.

But words don't bring the dead back, and she's fumbling for a equation to prove that it shouldn't have happened.

She doesn't find one.

* * *

_"Daddy? Do you love us?"_

_"That's silly! Of course he does!"_

_She looks up at him for confirmation, the slightest hint of worry in her blue eyes._

_A chuckle, then "Forever and always."_

Now she is awake.

Now she is silent, counting the minutes since forever has stopped.


	4. Chapter 4

The more that I see the less that I know that I know."

- John Lennon, _Borrowed Time_

* * *

The funeral is on a Sunday. It doesn't rain.

He sees her in one of the front rows marked "_family", _sitting in a hospital wheelchair flanked by her aunt and an old woman whose name he doesn't know. Dimly, he perceives that none of them are wearing black. He locks eyes with her.

_"How are you?"_

She gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head in response to his silent query, and before he knows what he's doing, he bounds up to the front and sits down next to her.

* * *

She hates it here. The church is too bright, too small, and altogether too happy for her liking. She's not wearing black, and neither is Aunt Claire or that woman who calls herself her paternal grandmother.

Funerals should be a celebration of life, _she_ insisted, and Aunt Claire had backed her with a watery whisper that Martin would have wanted it that way.

It has always been Skye's belief that funerals should be a somber matter, with wailing mourners shrouded in black and heavy rain pouring down in large increments against the stained glass windows of a darkened church, but she doesn't voice her opinion on the matter.

She doesn't answer _her_ questions on who to invite, either, choosing instead to stare out the window at the frustratingly sunny weather illuminating the hospital parking lot.

It's all making her heart break along familiar lines again, lines that she had thought had healed. But time can't heal everything ...

"Skye?"

She tears her thoughts away from those moments, and turns as best she can to face the boy next to her.

"What?"

"It's starting."


	5. Chapter 5

It's not as bad as Skye was expecting, until she sees the open coffins.

She's heard about how the bodies are supposed to look.

But they don't look peaceful or as if they've just fallen asleep.

No, that would be too cruel. They just look _dead._

And some small part of her is glad.

* * *

She hasn't said a word.

"I can't do this," she states.

He hesitates.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Skye, this is your family's funeral. You can't just-"

"_God_, Jeffrey. I _know_. But I can't do- _this_."

She gestures towards the balloons, the flowers, and the crowd that is trying so hard to pretend that everything is okay.

But it's not, and it won't ever really be.

* * *

She spots Pearson (_Pearson, of all people_) standing awkwardly next to her English teacher.

He gives her a sheepish smile, and she glares at him.

It's the first time she's acted like herself in weeks.


	6. Chapter 6

_November 23, Gardam Street_

Jeffrey wonders sometimes. Sometimes it hurts when he wonders, because he wonders about things he knows he can't have.

* * *

They're sitting out on the back patio in that house on Gardam Street, resting memories over a weathered table.

The silence is uneasy, with him stopping ocasionally to comment on the weather. She's not talking. It wasn't like this before. But he still takes a tenative second to finally ask what he's been wondering.

"Skye, do you ever think that-"

He swallows his words, considering, for a second, just how difficult their relationship has become.

"Well, before everything," His gaze drops. "We could have been-"

He shifts awkwardly in his chair.

There's a hint of something in her eyes that he can't quite make out. Contempt? Uncertainty? Amusement?

She reaches across the table for a picture without a frame, and as she turns it around in her hand, he sees that it's from the third time at Point Mouette, and they're both laughing at someone in the background (Jane, he thinks). His arm is wrapped around her shoulders and she's hanging onto his hand.

"I had this up on the wall, you idiot. What does that tell you?"

He hardly gets a chance to answer before she kisses him.


	7. Chapter 7

_"What day is it? And in what month? This clock never seemed so alive..."_

_- You and Me_, Lifehouse

It begins that day. They've lost track of the time somewhere between his lips and hers, and it isn't until the sun's cast the first shadows of evening that she leaves. She stays with her grandmother, who she doesn't talk about.

The weeks blur. He doesn't talk to her grandmother when he sees her, and she doesn't talk to him. They are both in an unwelcome agreement, with the girl between them sealing it. _Be home by eight-thirty._

* * *

It's typical high-school romance, all sparks and ashes and flames. But it goes deeper, somehow, than the way they breathe. It's still there. They burn as they always have.

They go on with life.


	8. Chapter 8

It's late spring bordering on early summer.

High school graduation.

There are fights. His mother is not paying for him to go to college and study music_(Really, Jeffrey, of all things- Why throw your life away?)__  
_

They go to their respective-_separate-_destinations _(I'm doing what's best for you) _in different states, as they have been.

They drift. They try to stay together, and it's hard. It's easier, in the end, to belong to themselves and not to each other.

* * *

But sometimes, it's easy to forget.

They go back to Gardam Street one day, and he kisses her in Quigley Woods behind what used to be Jane's rock. And it's not what used to be, it just _is_.

They are.

* * *

**Readers and reviewers, all of you remarkable people (YOU WONDERFUL CREATURES)**

**Thank you. ********Thank you, thank you,_ thank you _for everything.  
**

**Maybe for my next story I'll do something less depressing...**


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